


patch job

by palepinklipstick



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-01
Updated: 2016-06-01
Packaged: 2018-07-11 12:48:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7052299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/palepinklipstick/pseuds/palepinklipstick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But nothing hurts her quite the way Bruce does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	patch job

Selina Kyle is no fool.

She can’t be. Not with her lifestyle, not with her circumstances. It’s not that she’s special. She doesn’t think so anyway, and a lot of people would agree. Street trash is street trash. But, this is pivotal, Selina Kyle is no fool.

Bruce has grown.

She wants to pretend. She wants, so desperately, to pretend, that the tightening in her chest is because she’s proud. Because the funny little kid she’d become bound to now stands just a breath taller, just a breath broader. Still funny in his mannerisms, in the way he speaks. Ever a billionaire boy, certainly not street trash.

But it’s more than pride. When he turns her away, when he kisses Silver, the violent lurching in her stomach and the sting in her chest are so vivid she feels her head spin. When they make up, when he looks at her and says, with such intense conviction, that he would trust her with his life, she knows what the breathlessness means. She knows why he looks at her that way; feels his gaze when it burns through her, when he thinks she’s not looking, when he asks her to stay.

Bruce is nice. And here’s a secret she harbors in the depth of her heart, in the place where she’s still young and vulnerable and desperate for someone to come back. Whatever it is Bruce feels for her, she feels it too. Maybe more, maybe forever.

The thing is, Selina is no fool. She knows that, in the end, Bruce Wayne is a billionaire vigilante by choice or by vengeance or by whatever else goes on in his strange head. But she, _she_ is a thief by necessity and ill fortune and that is something Bruce will never understand.

She’s been smacked around for as long as she can remember. By angry store patrons she’d stolen from, when she’d been clumsier, less skillful; by mob bosses and by those awful boys when she tried to stop them from throwing that poor cat from the roof. But nothing hurts her quite the way Bruce does, quite the way Bruce can.  When he tells her that he will not come back with her, that he does not expect her to understand, it’s something like getting the wind knocked out of her.

She’s become a true master at masking her emotions; at hardening her eyes, drying her tears and never showing an ounce of weakness. But when she goes home and tosses that stupid leather jacket, with its stupid Bruce Wayne patch job, she crawls under her threadbare covers and cries herself to sleep.

_Who would care if you went missing? No one that’s who._

 

 


End file.
